I don’t think there are many distributions that are truly free, at least not in the eyes of the FSF. Fedora is not one of them.

but for what benefit? […] fedora is going to have off the shelf solutions

Yes, but that’s my point: fedora is already fully featured… the work needed is trivial, to the point that directly using an installation of fedora by itself (along with tools like ansible) wouldn’t be very different from doing he same with EU OS… at that point you don’t need a whole new distro, just Fedora and maybe some trivial scripts (which you are gonna need anyway in any large scale installation, even if you went with EU OS).

Imho, there would be more value if something actually novel was used, and new guides and howtos were created to simplify/clarify things that used to be hard. What would be a pity is to spend a lot of euros for something that is trivial to do, and that only helps filling the pockets of some corrupt politician’s friend. I mean, I’m not against a simple thing, but then I’d hope they at least showed how they will be spending the budget on some other way (marketing? …will there be actual custom software? …are they gonna maintain the entire repo themselves?).

well, the actual software and configuration i’d argue aren’t the important part - owning the infrastructure is the important part…

But I was not arguing against that. And if they did promise to do that, then that would be different. The problem is precisely that I’m expecting them to NOT own most of the infrastructure and instead rely on Fedora repositories, because from experience that’s how these things usually go.

I repeat the full context of the section you quoted: “I guess we’ll have to see how much they customize it, but in my experience with previous attempts, I’m expecting just a re-skin, just Fedora with different theme”

Maybe you have a different experience with government-managed distros, but there have been some attempts at that in my (european) country that were definitely not much more than a reskinned Ubuntu (and before that, Debian) from back in the day. They used Ubuntu repositories (ie. Ubuntu infrastructure), and the only extra repo they added was not a mirror, but just hosted a few packages that were actually produced by them and were responsible for the theming, reskining and defaults. They used metapackages that depend on upstream packages to control what was part of the default desktop environment, there might have been a few more extra packages (mainly backports), but very few and always lagging behind alternative backport repos. Uninstall the metapackage (which you might do if you wanna remove some of the preinstalled things) and it literally was Ubuntu straight from Ubuntu official repos. There was no filtering, no veto, no replacing, no mirroring.

Also, just to keep things grounded in the initial point: do you really think that Fedora / Red Hat would not benefit at all from it?

I largely agree, that’s why I was saying that I’m skeptical that all this will amount to anything substantial.

The will for independence exists in the EU, the problem is that the politicians don’t have the balls for it and they would rather push to maintain the status Quo in all the things that matter. Instead they focus on small things that appear good on paper but don’t really amount to anything. See for example the DMA and all it’s promises of forcing big corporations to bend the knee and stopping monopolies… even when a policy like that is written, it is hardly ever properly enforced. Has any company gotten any serious trouble for not implementing GDPR properly since it was introduced?

There has been a will towards more independence for a long time. Trump was just an extra push (and I’m still not convinced even that will be enough… all these initiatives sound good, but past experience has made me skeptical they will really amount to anything substantial).

But I don’t see it necessarily as anti-american. It’s more like we do need to cultivate local products and services more. Europe has for a while been falling behind in a lot of areas, combined with an aging population and an energy crisis, we really need to try and develop internally if we want to keep ourselves afloat, otherwise I’m not sure we can maintain a stable situation.

Yes, although Ctrl-M would be the “Carriage Return” character (\r). For the “Line Feed” newline character (\n) the Control combination would be Ctrl-J. Both of them would normally produce a new line when you press them on most terminals.

That’s why if you open in nano/vim a file with Windows style EOL (/r/n), you might see a strange ^M symbol at the end of each line.

To be more precise, it’s the “EOT” (end of transmission) control character, the 4th symbol in ASCII, from the non-printable character area.

This is true, but then why not base it off Guix (the GNU distro)? …I’m sure Fedora is full of binary blobs and not-so-free software.

If they needed it, they could still add extra software and blobs to Guix, sourced by the EU… and I think doing that would allow it to carve itself a niche (a version of Guix with more compatibility would be interesting for many) rather than sticking a white label on Fedora and call it something else. I don’t see a lot of value on this over just using Fedora directly, I’m not sure if it’s true that Fedora & Red Hat do not benefit from this… wouldn’t their support agents be able to just start providing support also to EU OS customers if they (both customers and support agents) want? Wouldn’t it make it more interesting for private companies working closely with the government to choose Red Hat as a partner when it comes to enterprise Linux?

I guess we’ll have to see how much they customize it, but in my experience with previous attempts, I’m expecting just a re-skin, just Fedora with different theme. At most, with some extra software preinstalled. I don’t think that’s a threat to Fedora or Red Hat, but rather an opportunity for expansion.